


Side Effects

by Charolastra



Category: Hamilton - Miranda, Hamilton - Miranda (Broadway Cast) RPF
Genre: Hamilton References, Other, Thomas Jefferson Being an Asshole
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-18
Updated: 2019-07-18
Packaged: 2020-06-30 13:51:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,421
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19854523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Charolastra/pseuds/Charolastra
Summary: After finding the strange patch dealer under the ruined streets Harlem, under the promise of improved courage and bravery, Thomas Jefferson has a nightmare.





	Side Effects

_Mayhem_.

That was the present occupier of most men's thoughts: how chaotic and devilish a single war could be.

The smell of death and fear was overwhelming. They mingled together and made their own execrable gas, diffusing and engulfing with no reluctance. It seemed to take him by the nose, forcing his features into a grimace he couldn't forbear. God, how he wished to raise his trembling voice and order his men gone--and more importantly, wished to remove his own person from that damned field. But how could he? The soldier himself could scarcely hear a clear sentence hollering above the terrible noise; the always-frightening reprise of training drills and target practice falling on him all at once seemed to morph into some horrible melody.  
No matter how many times he'd suffered to hear it, it never grew familiar to him. Every battle bore a new song that would never leave his head.

The clash of weapons and the gunshots beat a cadence of misery; the screams of the dying, piercing enough to shatter the glittering gates of Heaven, plucked at his taut nerves like some strange mandela's strings; the barked, barely intelligble commands rained hard and disappeared before they reached most ears--Forte piano, forte piano.  
Sometimes the song felt like it lasted hours, then other times mere minutes, before a retreat was declared and the fight song gave way to the shrieking of a rout a thousand strong. All of them intense and unforgiving, vociferous and taking the hearing and lives of soldiers with no compunction, so much as to be so terribly mind-numbing with the sheer carelessness.

However this time, there was something familiar in the sudden haze of activity: appearing comfortingly in the weird, dreamily disembodied vision of the soldier. Washington.  
Yes, the observer could see him. He certainly stood out, being so much taller than the others.  
It was all too easy, though, to lose him when he lead the charge. The humble leader wore the simple uniforms with little to identify himself from the rest and acted as one with his men, ducking his blue-clad shoulders and leveling that damaging rifle in time with his men, then with the flock of red barreling to meet them. Somehow oblivious to the pain around him but so perfectly and paradoxically aware.

Those broad shoulders conducted the band of ragtag sinners and soldiers alike; they rose as he held his rifle to his eyes, prepared to shoot; so the roar engulfing him crescendoed. They fell sharply when the bayonet swiped expertly at an all-too-close call; thus did the noise. It continued at the same level, despite the alarming amount of men and boys dropping from the deathly orchestra.

So was /that/ the dreadful melody he already recognized emerging from the chaos, and was that galavanting man the leading instrument?  
Or was it just the drummer boy?

The drummer boy.  
The wandering gaze of the silent observer seemed to switch from hundreds of squabbling bodies to just one. Bereft in height and mingling about the legs of the grown fighters, he beat a fast pace with white-tipped mallets on his drum, held fast to his chest. Rrrrat-ta-tat-tat. Rrrrat-ta-tat-tat. Again and again and again--the battle's one and only constant, one and only given. Roll, tap, tap, tap, tap. Roll, tap, tap, tap, tap.  
And such a hefty responsibility the drummer boy carried! It was his job to keep the blood pumping and the feet moving fast with a hasty beat. The speed of his small, delicate hands decided the very heartbeat of the ragtag army. Perhaps even heralded the outcome of the event.  
But oh my, he was just that: a boy, fresh in the face, and a triffling obstacle for an assailant far too angry to bother aiming the gun.

Gawking did nothing to preserve the poor boy, yet gawk and regard was all the pained observer could do. Peering into the small hazel orbs, those shimmering pools of emotion reflecting a scene most brutal, sent nothing but a spear of sadness into his heart. How he wished to reach out and assist. The pale oval face made the purple about his eyes all the more overt. The pursed lips and clenched jaw proclaimed haggard that should not be seen on features so juvenile.  
Something tragic must have brought the poor boy to such a monstrous career. A lack of money, perhaps--the drum was certainly not new, the soldier could see, and the straps holding it to his fragile person shifted and snapped back with each calculated step he took towards the enemy.  
How brave his outside looked.  
How proud his parents would've been. If no one else, he ought to live to see them, and him alone.

Still, the soldier's limbs found no willing animation at his most intense encouraging. It felt as though all his moves had been preplanned: he extended an arm every once in a while, pointed with a trembling forefinger and speared the sound of gunshots with brief vocals, in that strangely familiar tenor, to an unknown listener. He took a tentative step forward, a few back, paced the springy grass. It all felt right, like he had seen it so often, but he couldn't change his actions any time--his body and spirit at the mercy of this peculiar repetition. The effort of lifting a finger out of set was tantamount the stress of carrying bricks on his hand.

And he could never...see it. It was not there with him as his eyes were on the field, combing so close to the fighting while somehow feeling distant from the scuffles unfolding. It was only the feeling of his muscles working to move him about.  
It felt weird.  
How cruel it was that he was free to look wherever, whenever, though never move a muscle unscheduled. Especially egregious the thought became when the drummer boy gave an alarming start right before him.

The drum's taut sheet had burst right before him; plucked off it's clamp by a wayward bullet. Its submission to the tiny metal monster produced a snap so audible and vile on the ears, yet it went unheard by every one else.  
Then when the white-tipped mallets found no surface to accost as it had, his little hands dove into the belly of the drum. With no tims to suspect this happening, the anxious pools expanded and the tiny feet stumbled, tied up by grass and dirt and the shock that oh Lord, he'd been shot at. The porceline skin of his features contorted so viciously from stolidity into fear.

Presently, the soldier's view was wavering, gliding lethargically from the dummer boy's slim figure. He could only see his back, tiny shoulders drawn forward and the hands stuck within the drum, when he jerked upwards once and crashed headlong into the dirt.  
His body was obscured at once by high boots and flailing rifles and scabbards and the cut-up cerulean of soldier's coats, telling novels worth of near-death and triumphant experiences. No sooner had the space opened than it had been filled, and the barrage of gunfire began anew in the one oasis of silence.

Get away, get away from the body, away away-- something dipped so horribly within the observer's chest, like some wretched hand of emotion had snatched up his heart. Oh my, now it all felt real.  
And he could move! He could move and he could see it, see hands and blue-clad arms pushing, pushing, fighting the surge of untrained farmers and merchants flowing forward and forward; his hands, his arms. He could feel his shoulders clashing with others and his rifle, freshly weeping smoke, jostling around in his saturated hands. Sweat. He was sweating.

Figured; nearly being crushed in the amount of soldiers bordering all sides of him would cause a new surge of body heat. He certainly felt the air grow thicker, acknowledged his chest's heaving to take in what precious oxygen he could manage and his heart racing like it was to leap from his chest...

...It wasn't the heat.  
Humidity was a constant issue, but now a trifle in comparison to the insurmountable feeling brewing in his stomach. Perhaps the heat augmented it?  
Now that he mentioned it, he really felt the heat. Perspiration beaded and fell from his forehead, his nose, in heavy rivulets, laving cross his lips and cresting the subtle rises of his pale cheekbones. Odd, it was, how he felt the sun so pristinely on his back, causing his coat to stick to him and the golden tasles atop his shoulders to seem to dance and shimmer in the sun when he turned, ever so slightly, his head, to examine the field before him; he peered about as he walked still, treading without care of where his feet found solidness. Such as the rest of the army.

His situation was overall concerning. Inauspicious, even as he was knocked sideways from time to time as though he could be spared the jostling of other men around him. No such luck.  
Speaking of the men--he hadn't seen a speck of red since he'd appeared behind the boy. Not a sliver nor a single view of an enemy man Only the obnoxious blue. How a bullet had broken through that wall of blue, the soldier wondered if he would ever know.

The wall thickened, briefly, and things slowed. Without quite hunting for one, he found a single spot to stand fast. Though it was more akin to him running into somebody who had stopped and momentarily stunning himself. But he had put his feet on pause for that saving moment, and, like a boulder in a stream, the blue wall, instead of pushing him with it, broke right before him and surged past both sides.  
He could hold still, for just a moment.  
With cautious hands, he lowered his rifle, then allowed his digits to rove across it's glittering surface. The barrel was warm.  
He didn't remember firing.

Hell, he didn't even know how to fire a gun!  
How did he recognize this damned field like he had travelled it before? How did his feet, though they were as blind as he was in the sea of color, somehow know where the divots and catching points in the ground were? Unexplainable, it was, at the very foundation of this notion. Perhaps he was experiencing a bout of amnesia.  
While his apparent comrades were dying, he stood beside them, a rather confused candle in a hurricane. Bullets shot down, forward, sideways; on the occasion upward, contrasting the blue sky with a fulgurous streak of smoke, then falling. Evincing a soldier hurled to his death.  
The observer found himself watching those streaks with a sick curiosity. Finding the angle sparked the coiled fuse of his mind with wonders of whether the loss of a head among the sea, in one spot, tied the bullet to that man. There was no uncertain pattern leading to a felled soldier.

He wished he'd been able to identify the scoundrel who shot at the boy. He couldn't believe someone had dared to frighten him further! The poor lad was so scared, so unknowing, when the first shot ripped through his simple instrument. It must've been for laughs--a joke, if it was such, that had clearly gone wrong. Cruel was the God who did nothing about this...this shit show. The vindictive part of him wished one of those streaking lights belonged to he who had shot the kid.

Before he could cement the thought, his eyes were torn from the sky by something thrashing him.  
No, not thrashing--something had met with his left shoulder and was pressing down on him? On his ear was a similar pressure and hot breath, spitting in time with a shouting he couldn't understand. Loud, loud, loud, so loud his eyes involuntarily shut, but the pressure didn't abate and the shouting increased.  
All of a sudden, cool air was flowing past him. His eyes had parted to witness the blue sky pass him in a blur, and a brown like the shade of his rifle rushing up to meet him--

Thomas awoke with a start.  
His eyes slid open and locked fast onto the ceiling, as though he feared it would flee from him.  
The pounding in his chest resided gradually and the alarm, though it had been so poignant, diminished and left him.  
Just as suddenly, the unbearable heat was pulled from his skin and the sweat had simply melted off. He was at his own domicile, reclined in his own lovely bed. The cool sheets fit perfectly atop his body and provided relief from the shock of his precipitous 'change' of location.

Thomas was okay. That was what mattered.  
In the quietest night he had ever experienced, among a darkness only slivered by the moonlight high above his window, Thomas rose to a sitting position. Anxiety coerced him into giving his room a once-over to combat the dread brewing inside the pit of his stomach.  
There was nothing but barely visible shadows. He was alone in his room.  
Alone and safe. The frightening caricature of music seemed to leave with that awful dream, though it rang in his ears. Tomorrow he ought to practice his violin to rid the melody.  
Or perhaps write a tune from its less broken beat.  
One of those, decided the Virginian. He nodded to himself, brushed back the displaced hair from his eyes--and something on his wrist caught his eye.

Ah. The patch.  
His prized purchase from the strange-scented underground...bar.  
The pattern upon it seemed to melt into his skin, like it had claimed that inch-wide square of flesh in no uncertain terms. It throbbed, not painfully, but like it was...agitated.

The white square bore a red drum with mallets hovering just above its surface, ready to strike it. The white caps upon their very ends seemed to pervade the darkness around his hand with its minute glow.  
Ignore it; he warned you about it. It's meaning is benign and merely a side effect.  
Thomas returned his tired body to it's reclined position and the blankets to their place overtop him. His scruples forgotten and the throbbing now subsiding, he found it easier to relax among the subtle comfort of his pillows and other belongings.  
"Side effects are not uncommon," echoed the shopkeep, "and will present in any way. Think nothing of their meaning."  
So he didn't.


End file.
